About

Umi Walking With a Candle refers to a GIF of the bunny character Umi from the Steam indie horror game Rental nervously walking down a dark hallway with a candle. Many who saw the GIF at first mistakenly believed that it was from the game Animal Crossing. It went viral on Twitter / X in 2024 and 2025 due to a series of GIF caption posts, which used the GIF to represent being uncomfortable or nervous in a given situation. In the following weeks, many X users began parodying the tweets that used the GIF earnestly, due to a widely held perception that many of the uncomfortable situations posed in them weren't as scarring as the users had suggested.

Origin

On March 7th, 2024, the indie horror game Rental was released on Steam,^[1] developed by Lonely House, also known as @sukinapan on X.^[2] Steam user y⛧u shared a GIF from the game to the Steam Community^[12] page for Rental, showing the game's protagonist, Umi, a bunny, walking down a dark corridor with a candle.

On March 8th, X^[3] user @rundry tweeted the GIF and captioned it, "How it feels to stay up past 11pm." Over one year, the tweet received over 112,000 likes and is currently the first known post to use the GIF memetically online.

Spread

On March 12th, 2024, X^[4] user @jackcashew used the GIF, captioning it, "How it feels to retake with 4 people spectating you," gaining over 6,900 likes in a year.

On November 21st, Tumblr^[5] user witchblade posted the GIF, captioned, "im on that good kush an acahol," which was a misspelling of I'm On That Good Kush And Alcohol, said by rapper Future in the Lil Wayne song "Love Me."

Then, on November 28th, 2024, Tumblr^[6] user pls-send-me-help-21 reblogged witchblade's post, attaching a version of the GIF that added the user's misspelled quote in a top and bottom caption, gaining over 29,100 notes in a year.

On December 27th, X^[7] user @pyrarity used the GIF in a tweet with a POV caption about joining a Discord server where "everyone is interacting and having fun." Over one year, the post received roughly 188,000 likes.

The GIF retained use heading into 2025, like on January 4th, X^[8] user @INDIEWASHERE tweeted it, captioning it, "Going from app to app trying to avoid AI." It garnered over 259,000 likes in 11 months.

During the same timeframe, the GIF continued to amass viral use on Tumblr.^[11]

In November 2025, a slew of ironic posts using the GIF surfaced that parodied precursor uses by accompanying the media with non-threatening situations or edgy jokes.

For instance, on November 17th, X^[9] user @ouiouiapey tweeted, "Heard a language that wasn’t English at Target," gaining over 16,000 likes in 18 days.

On November 24th, 2025, X^[10] user @iamyomas quote-tweeted a post that asked, "What's the lore behind your birth?" @iamyomas attached the Umi Walking With a Candle GIF, captioned, "So like… my parents um… did the… S word…." Over 11 days, the post gained over 274,000 likes.

Various Examples

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Search Interest

External References